Buy tubes from Audio Research or not


I need to retube my amp and I'm having trouble deciding whether I should buy my tubes from Audio Research or buy them on the open market. If you have any experience with this I'd appreciate your help.
taters
Taters if you're worried talk to Howard at Audio Specialists in Studio City he's a great tech, repairs ARC and will know what does and doesn't causes problems.
Do more research. I could be wrong, but I remember there being problems with retubing and biasing VT-100 amps. Unfortunately, I don't remember which version of the amp. What I do remember of the discussion was that Upscale Audio would no longer sell tubes for the amp because of the problems buyers faced installing them.
Tater, with ARC I think you are pretty much going to be stuck with the brand they carry. I'm sure they choose what brands to choose on the basis of reliability
and price points. The sound quality may be good too, but what they have may not be your preference for sound quality. If you checkout the Tubedepot or The Tubestore, they have a pretty good selection as well as some sound descriptions of the tubes. I'm thinking about tube rolling my ARC REF 5 with some NOS tubes . Good luck.
I re-tubed my VT100iii w/matched winged "O"'s and 6H30's from the Tube Store and biased them myself. Leonard at ARC walked me through the process before I did it, even though I did not buy the tubes from ARC. No problems and fine results. I don't agree with Cyclonicman's suggestion to keep ARC tubes around in case of a problem, to deceive ARC. There's right and there's wrong and that aint right.